Comedy's Post-Funny School

By RICHARD CORLISS

A new wave of "humorists "assaults accepted ideas of clowning

This is show business? A mime so inept he must describe his gestures to the audience. A grinning, phosphorescent-suited fellow who plays with funny balloon animals. A comic with a bag over his head who does a ventriloquist routine featuring a hand puppet that has a paper bag over its head. A talk-show host who is all smarm and insult jokes. A Carnegie Hall entertainer who shows cartoons, leads sing-alongs and wrestles with women volunteers from the audience. A female comic in Wayne Newton drag who unbuttons her shirt to reveal a forest of chest hair.

Hey now, is this stuff funny--or what?To a lot of people the routines are crashingly unfunny. But to others they represent a new permanent wave in the history of popular humor: an assault on the accepted notions of show-business clowning.

The new comics have jettisoned the topical satire of the '60s for a less political, more radical examination of the comic's relation to the society he entertains. The traditional comedian kept searching for the definitive belly laugh; the new humorist looks at the jokes, and the pursuit of them, with the icy disinterest of a social critic. As the subject of modern art is art, so the subject of the new comedy is comedy--the good, the bad, the unintentionally ugly. Call it the Post-Funny School of Comedy.

What began as a defiant form of anti-shtik has become a dominant mode in the funny-peculiar '80s. It is saturating the big screen with the films of Albert Brooks (the mime), Steve Martin (funny balloon animals), Murray Langston (the paper-bagged Unknown Comic), Martin Mull (the Fernwood 2-Night talk-show host), Andy Kaufman (heterosexual wrestling), Lily Tomlin (Wayne Newton) and the now-ready-for-prime-time cutups of NBC's Saturday Night Live. It took over TV years ago--in 1975, when S.N.L. hit the air and became a focal point for the new comedy. With success came healthy midnight ratings for NBC, and with the ratings came the inevitable imitation, ABC's Fridays. S.N.L. Alumnus Harry Shearer calls Fridays "the Cloneheads"; but when the show was in direct competition with the Tonight Show, it frequently drew more viewers than Johnny Carson and forced NBC to produce its own late-Friday comedy series, SCTV Network/90, featuring the cast of yet another spoof show, the syndicated SCTV. Somebody out there must be laughing --maybe the networks and movie studios, all the way to the post-funny bank.

So what do these comics do? Start by saying what they do not do. They do not spin whimsical stories of urban childhoods, like Bill Cosby and George Carlin. They do not deal in analysis and self-hatred, like Woody Allen and Rodney Dangerfield. They do not refract their rage in race-and-reefer jokes, like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. They do not tell topical or political jokes, like Johnny Carson. Indeed, they rarely tell jokes or stories at all. They do not talk about their mothers, their wives, their egos. Their past is a mystery; their presence is perplexing. They may be the first generation of comics to forgo the funnyman's implicit plea: love me by laughing at me. The post-funny comics can do without both.

Steve Martin filters laugh-a-minute zaniness through Redford good looks: goy meets Berle. Mull intones mantras of malevolent banality. Tomlin incarnates sorority queens and shopping-bag ladies with the intensity of Piaf and the emotional range of either Hepburn. Brooks works the baroque side of the street. Kaufman's characters populate a doll's house of the bizarre. They are as different from one another as bright young people can be. But they share a basic belief--that the business of America is show business --and a fascination with the detritus of the entertainment industry. Steve Allen, who has studied comedy almost as long as he has produced it, describes the new comics' strategy this way: "They imitate jerks."

The subject of their deadpan ridicule is the netherworld of Reno lounge acts and Rotary Club M.C.s, talk-show ciphers and the I-hate-you-but-deep-down-inside-I'm-a-wonderful-guy Janus face of Don Rickles. To the post-funny comics, all the world's a cramped stage in a seedy Newark bar, and all the men and women --onstage or off--merely sweaty-palmed buffoons following the dog act. With devastating acuity, the post-funny comics evoke these laugh-cadging mendicants of the entertainment industry. And because the post-funnies are superb deadpan actors, their exaggeration has the gritty kick of a Fred Wiseman documentary. One does not titter so much as cringe.

Beneath the deft mimicry is the cultural critic's remove from his subject and his audience. This is not new. All humor is a detached analysis, an autopsy of the society's dreams and demons. As the sit-down iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche put it, "A joke is an epitaph on an emotion." The post-funny comics go a step further by taking the ironist's step back. By making fun of the obsequiousness and desperation found in the lower circles of show-business purgatory, they are chiseling epitaphs on epitaphs. They haunt cemeteries of frayed hopes and failed jokes; they rob graves of moldering bits of business; they read the requiem for popular entertainment. They are the children of television, the nephews and nieces of Vegas, the grandchildren of baggy-pants burlesquers--and they have turned on their elders with the fury of a patricidal Greek.

But who is the object of this vengeance: mainstream entertainers, or the comic's audience? With Andy Kaufman it can be hard to tell. Six years ago, he showed up on the first Saturday Night Live, smiled innocently at the audience and, phonograph to one side, mimed a single line from the chorus of a Mighty Mouse song. Is it funny? Is it art?

Kaufman, 30, complicates matters by insisting that certain of his routines are dead serious. Says Allen, who admires Kaufman: "You can never tell if he is putting you on or not. It's like talking to a religious fanatic. Everything he does is strangely real to him." As a child on Long Island, N.Y., Kaufman put on shows for the neighborhood children. Much of the material he performs today is the stuff of his youth; only the audience has changed.

Kaufman is now playing a robot in Heartbeeps, to be released in the fall. It is an appropriate character for Kaufman: his humor, his presence, his act seem not only post-funny but posthuman. And sometimes it can hurt. Three months ago, as the guest host of Fridays, Kaufman engaged in a seemingly spontaneous shoving match with the show's cast and crew; a week later he was back--unshaven, disheveled, distraught--to confess that his behavior had put his career in jeopardy with "the show-business community," then sobbed and fell silent. Was he serious? Is he mad? Perhaps he was once again playing the Duchampian agent provocateur of modern comedy: the Dada of haha.

"It doesn't hurt to make people laugh," says Albert Brooks of Kaufman. "There should be laughter. Otherwise it's some other art form." If Kaufman functions as a one-man Weather Underground, Brooks is a more accessible, ultimately more subversive radical professor of post-funny comedy. Says Brooks, who was born Albert Einstein, son of the dialect comedian Parkyakarkus: "Life is so bizarre anyway, the slightest twist can make it really funny." Brooks' twist is so slight, so deft, that many may not get the joke. In 1975 he and Harry Shearer wrote and produced A Star Is Bought, a record album ostensibly designed to "sell" Albert Brooks to various radio audiences. There was a patriotic monologue for country stations, a novelty record for the Top-40 market, a vocal version of Bolero, a Jack Benny-type radio show for the nostalgia network. Each track was, of course, meticulously uncommercial. The Brooks character was eager to sell out, but so inept that nobody wanted to buy.

For the past few years Brooks has been making films: first a series of shorts for Saturday Night Live, then the theatrical features Real Life (1979) and Modern Romance, now in release. In his films he is not the Tonight Show Albert Brooks, putting bozo entertainers through a Cuisinart of irony; he is Albert Brooks dicing and slicing the comedy commodity named "Albert Brooks" -- an earnest obsessive just this side of obnoxious. By comparison Woody Allen plays it safe: despite the misogyny and paranoid fatalism, his comic persona is essentially lovable. Brooks plays hardball, with himself as the wall. On S.N.L. he played a comedian preparing to perform heart surgery on a patient who has answered his want ad. In Real Life he is a comedian who makes a documentary film about an American family and destroys them in the process. In Modern Romance he is a Los Angelized Woody Allen, following his beloved from pique to pique.

"Albert Brooks" is no mensh, but neither is he an obvious ogre. Nothing is obvious in Brooks' work. It is only halfway through Modern Romance --about the time he is riffling through his girlfriend's phone bills to determine if she is conducting a transcontinental affair on the side -- that you are likely to wonder, "Does this guy realize how unlikable he is?" It is at this moment that Brooks' strategy has succeeded. He has made you more profoundly ill at ease than Don Rickles ever could. Insult comics merely try to focus hostility; Brooks is after something more insidious: the moral squirm.

"I don't experience basic human emotions," says Brooks on A Star Is Bought. "It's just not my thing." Maybe he is not kidding. A generous, spontaneously funny man offstage, Brooks may find emotion, feeling, the search for universal focal points of laughter to be pandering as part of his act. It is more challenging to bring his Saturday Night Live film to life and perform unlicensed surgery on the American body politic. At last report there were indications that the patient would survive. But these surgeons could prove so successful that what is left of our national sense of humor -- the spontaneous bark of pleasure that results from the infusion of a recognizably human thought or feeling into the listener's nervous system -- may die on the operating table. And the last words the patient hears shall be: "Hey, pal, you're beautiful. I love you to death." --By Richard Corliss

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